1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to efficient handing of semi-asynchronous RAID write failures in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. A data processing system typically includes a processor subsystem having at least one central processing unit (CPU), an input/output (I/O) subsystem, a memory subsystem and a bus subsystem. The memory subsystem of the data processing system typically includes a data storage system having a controller connected to a back end storage. The controller controls the flow of data between the data processing system and the back end storage. The controller includes a cache memory that is typically implemented by static memories. During operation, the cache memory serves as a temporary store for data associated with a write I/O request.
These data processing systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Large amounts of data have to be processed daily and the current trend suggests that these amounts will continue being ever-increasing in the foreseeable future. For the most part, computing systems face a significant challenge to meet the increasingly stringent reliability demands and failure tolerances imposed by many software applications. In particular, responses to I/O requests in such data storage systems can be poorly defined in the wake of a failure that disrupts the processing of I/O requests. Accordingly, it would be desirable to improve the failure tolerance of data storage systems without compromising reliability and data availability.